Gendered Interventions Frontispiece: Caricature of a Nineteenth-Century Woman Orator Addressing a "Promiscuous" Audience

Gendered Interventions Frontispiece: Caricature of a nineteenth-century woman orator addressing a "promiscuous" audience. From Eduard Fuchs, Die Frau in der Karikatur: Sozialgeschkhte der Frau, 1906; reprint 1973. (Courtesy of Harvard College Library.) Gendered Interventions Narrative Discourse in the Victorian Novel Robyn R. Warhol Rutgers University Press New Brunswick and London Parts of this book have appeared in published articles. Most of Chapter 2 comes from "Toward a Theory of the Engaging Narrator: Earnest Interventions in Gaskell, Stowe, and Eliot," PMLA 101 (1986): 811-818; Chapter 5 draws upon "Poetics and Persuasion: Uncle Tom's Cabin as a Realist Novel," Essays in Literature 13 (1986): 283-298; and passages from "Letters and Novels 'One Woman Wrote to Another': George Eliot's Responses to Elizabeth Gaskell," Victorian Newsletter 70 (1986): 8-14 appear in Chapters 3,5, and 7. A condensed version of Chapter 7 is forthcoming in Psychohistory Review. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Warhol, Robyn R. Gendered interventions : narrative discourse in the Victorian novel / Robyn R. Warhol. p. cm. Bibliography: p. Includes index. ISBN 0-8135-1456-8 1. English fiction—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Feminism and literature—Great Britain—History— 19th century. 3. Women and literature—Great Britain—History— 19th century. 4. Authors and readers—Great Britain—History—19th century. 5. Direct discourse in literature. 6. Point of view (Literature) 7. Sex role in literature. 8. Narration (Rhetoric) I. Title. PR878.F45W37 1989 823'.8'o923—dci9 89-30379 British Cataloging-in-Publication information available Copyright © 1989 by Rutgers, The State University All Rights Reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Contents Preface, vii Acknowledgments, xvii PART I. Proposing a Model: Feminism and Narratology Chapter i. Introduction: Why Don't Feminists 'Do' Narratology? 3 Chapter 2. A Model of Gendered Intervention: Engaging and Distancing Narrative Strategies 25 PART II. Testing the Model: Interventions in Texts Chapter 3. Engaging Strategies, Earnestness, and Realism: Mary Barton 47 Chapter 4. Distancing Strategies, Irony, and Metafiction: Yeast and Vanity Fair 72 Chapter 5. Women's Narrators Who Cross Gender: Uncle Tom's Cabin and Adam Bede 101 Chapter 6. Men's Narrators Who Cross Gender: Can You Forgive Her? and Bleak House 134 PART III. Reflecting upon the Model: Gendered Interventions in History Chapter 7. The Victorian Place of Enunciation: Gender and the Chance to Speak 159 Chapter 8. Direct Address and the Critics: What's the Matter with "You"? 192 Notes, 207 Works Cited, 223 Index, 237 Preface I WANT TO TALK about something embarrassing: direct address to readers or audiences. In narrative contexts it always poses problems, unless the speaker is making a joke. Groucho Marx or Woody Allen or a character in a Godard film can turn to the camera to "break the frame" with an ironic remark and get a laugh, as can the narrators in novels by W. M. Thackeray, John Fowles, or John Barth. Direct address in narrative begins to embar rass, however, when it is no longer offered in jest—when the speaker who assails "you" is in earnest. If I may judge by my experience of academic readers—colleagues and students—I can safely guess that you dislike serious direct address in texts. You find it preachy, or cute, or coy. You think of it as a technical error, a lapse of artistry, a cheap effect. It irritates you when you run across it in Victorian novels, and it is irritating you at this very moment, as you read. Why is that? I contend that our prejudice against earnest (as opposed to ironic) direct address stems from our culture's aversion to feminine gestures. In Victorian novels written by women, earnest direct address evolved as an alternative to public speaking "in person," which was forbidden to respect able females. Realist novels provided opportunities for women to speak through their narrators to "you," in a serious, nonliterary way seldom practiced by male Victorian novelists. Those earnest interventions, those direct appeals to "y°u>" took on a feminine gender in the middle of the nineteenth century. As women's narrators used them to intervene in their fictional texts, women novelists used them to intervene in history. Hence, in the feminine "gendered intervention," history and text converge while a feminine presence is projected, for the moment, into the reading experience. vn Preface And that feminine presence inspires embarrassment, even now, when women's literal presence in public is a matter of course. Recent criticism focusing on the role ideology has played in forming the literary canon has taught us that women's writing has been system atically devalued, and for the most part flatly excluded from the Great Anglo-American Tradition. Most of that criticism concentrates on what narratologists would call the "story" (histoire) in men's and women's novels, or, as Seymour Chatman puts it, "the what in a narrative that is depicted" (19). Some elements of story that have been receiving attention from ideo logically inspired critics include the nature of characters and events repre sented in fiction, the reiteration of typical scenes and themes, and the "moral" or message transmitted by the text. Until now, no one has scru tinized the "discourse" (recit) of mid-nineteenth-century novels, the precise ways in which those stories get told. By focusing on interruptions in the story—which Gerard Genette calls "narrative interventions," thus avoid ing the negative connotations of "intrusions"—I propose to examine a less obvious difference between "masculine" and "feminine" Victorian texts. In analyses (not readings) of individual novels, I look at the structure, stance, content, and evident intention of passages addressed to "you," in order to uncover that difference. I stress that these are analyses, not readings, because interpretation is not the goal of this study. I propose no new way of understanding what Victorian novels are trying to communicate. Instead, I am looking at how they try, in order to point out that critical prejudice against narrative techniques can be as much affected by issues of gender as can critical assumptions about the forms and contents of fiction. The three parts of this book are themselves interventions in three ongoing conversations among critics. Part I enters the debate among femi nist theorists over the usefulness of androcentric critical models for feminist criticism and offers a model combining feminism with structuralist nar ratology. Part II addresses criticism of novels written by male and female authors, examining narrative interventions as guides to what kind of novels these are. Following the model proposed in Part I, I analyze novels whose narrators rely upon feminine, masculine, and cross-gendered modes of intervention, looking at their authorial intrusions in the context of the novelists' gendered experience and their implied or expressed novelistic goals. Part III moves the conversation to the realm of history, both social Vll l PREFACE and literary. It describes the historical circumstances under which men and women found themselves making choices among modes of narrative stance in novels and it questions the theoretical and critical tradition that has suppressed or derided earnest direct address to this day. In that it makes narrative interventions in nineteenth-century novels its central subject, this study does not seek to (re)do what other books on feminist theory or Victorian fiction have done. Because the combination of feminism, narratology, and Victorian studies must necessarily frustrate some critical expectations, even as it raises new ones, I want to outline what the book will not do, before beginning to do what it will. First, although speaking of "gendered writing" inevitably raises the specter of "difference" in its many contemporary forms, I will not tackle more than a few of its manifestations. My primary concern with gender differences springs neither from deconstruction's model of differance nor from the new French feminisms' psychoanalytic theories of essential sexual difference. I am treating gender instead as a social construct, a set of learned behaviors that an individual adopts to express or demonstrate his or her gender identification. Gender, in this social or anthropological sense, in cludes outward signs of one's sexual identity, such as clothing, gestures, vocal inflection and—I would suggest—narrative strategies. Just as men and women can cross dress to present themselves in the mode associated with another gender, novelists, too, can choose (somewhat less self-con- sciously, no doubt) to use techniques associated with the other sex. Eve Sedgwick, Teresa de Lauretis, and Nancy Miller, among others, have looked into the ways gender colors the production of story in narrative; to complement what they have done, the present study concentrates on gen ders influence upon discourse. Though narratology's basic distinction between story and discourse and its precise language for describing textual phenomena are central to this project, I will not be limiting my categories of narrative stance to those already proposed by other narratologists. Among them, only Gerald Prince has elaborated a theory of the "narratee" (augmented by the work of Mary Ann Piwowarczyk) to account for the possible answers to the question, Whom does the narrator address? Prince has described the relation between narrator and narratee that prevails in many canonical texts, from the be ginnings of the novel to the modern period. As I intend to show, however, the same relation does not always prevail in British and American novels of IX Preface the mid-nineteenth century. Like most contemporary narrative theorists, Prince takes it for granted that the narratee is always a fictive, created figure, standing in roughly the same relation to the actual reader as does the narrator to the actual author. In the strictest sense, this assumption is certainly valid: when actual readers vary so obviously, from period to pe riod, or from person to person, the logical impossibility of "the real readers" presence in any text is obvious.

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